In Chris Cleave’s Little Bee and Incendiary, the characters Little Bee and the unnamed narrator respectively, undergo a traumatic experience in the early stages of the books. Little Bee is confined in an immigration detention center upon her arrival in England for not having legal documents to prove her age. Meanwhile, the unnamed narrator has her life blown apart by a terrorist attack that kills her husband and four year old son. Both characters lose the hope and faith in their world and adjust to their new lives accordingly. Little Bee disguises herself physically, verbally, and legally in order to stay safe from the dangers of her new life. The narrator combats her emotional breakdown by helping to investigate the instigator behind the terrorist attack. Even though the challenges they face may not be similar in nature, both ladies undergo the same sequence of events starting with trauma, followed by complete depletion of their self-esteem and finally a revival through the aid of others around them. Though their environments are different, they undergo analogous changes in their outlook and behavior towards their hardships. In Little Bee and Incendiary, both characters suffer traumatic experiences that result in them losing their faith in themselves and their hope of a better world. Moreover, these two characters are placed in extremely different situations, but they both have their lives exacerbated by the experiences they go through. Little Bee, a sixteen year old Nigerian girl who travels to England to flee her country’s conditions, finds herself confined in an immigration detention center for not having legal documents proving her age. Furthermore, during her confinement, Little Bee strives to protect herself from people in... ... middle of paper ... ...this point all the hope she has been trying to build up since the bombing is completely depleted. She finds out about the corruption that plagues the city she was putting forth her best effort and time to protect. Moreover, this is where the character’s development unfolds and is clear to the reader. Instead of letting her emotions break her down like before, the narrator strives to concentrate on the good aspects of the situation and to stay optimistic. Overall, both Little Bee and the narrator are victims of distressingly traumatic experiences that send their lives into darkness. However, they both find a branch of hope to cling onto before reaching the bottom; with the help of people around them. Finally, both characters undergo immense changes by building up courage and emotional strength to burst through the barriers that stand between them and a better life.
People share their secret lives without even talking about them. It only takes a glance or feeling to see that others have faced similar situations and problems, some people even live parallel lives. Despite the fact that many people believe it impossible for a measly insect, like a bee, to know the pain hardships a human faces, Sue Monk Kidd proves them wrong with her book The Secret Life of Bees. In her novel she derives many of her characters from the types of bees that exist in a hive. Lily and Zach have characteristic that are akin to that of field bees, August has that nurturing personality of a nurse bee, and the Lady of Chains is revered by her subjects just like a Queen bee is by her hive. Nowadays, no one ever faces a problem that someone, or something, has already faced. No one really has a secret life all to themselves.
needs to make up his own ritual that he can do before running into a
As strong, independent, self-driven individuals, it is not surprising that Chris McCandless and Lily Owens constantly clashed with their parents. In Jon Krakauer’s novel, Into the Wild, Chris was a twenty-four-year-old man that decided to escape the materialistic world of his time for a life based on the simplistic beauty of nature. He graduated at the top of his class at Emory University and grew up in affluent Annandale, Virginia, during the early 1980’s. In The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Lily was a fourteen-year-old girl who grew up in the 1960’s, a time when racial equality was a struggle. She had an intense desire to learn about her deceased mother. Her nanny, Rosaleen, with whom she grew very close over the years, raised Lily with little help from her abusive father. When her father failed to help Rosaleen after three white men hospitalized her, Lily was hysterical. Later, Lily decided to break Rosaleen out of the hospital and leave town for good. While there are differences between Chris McCandless and Lily Owens, they share striking similarities. Chris McCandless’ and Lily Owens’s inconsistencies of forgiveness with their parents resulted in damaged relationships and an escape into the unknown.
Most runaway youth are homeless because of neglect, abuse and violence, not because of choice. Lily Owens is the protagonist in the novel, Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, is no different. Lily is a fourteen year-old girl still grieving over her mother's death. T. Ray a man who has never been able to live up to the title of a father, due to years of abuse, has not made it any easier. Lily is a dynamic character who in the beginning is negative and unconfident. However, throughout the novel Lily starts to change into the forgiving person she is at the end.
In life, actions and events that occur can sometimes have a greater meaning than originally thought. This is especially apparent in The Secret Life Of Bees, as Sue Monk Kidd symbolically uses objects like bees, hives, honey, and other beekeeping means to present new ideas about gender roles and social/community structures. This is done in Lily’s training to become a beekeeper, through August explaining how the hive operates with a queen, and through the experience Lily endures when the bees congregate around her.
She noted that she hears comments like, “You people are dumb. You people live in trees. Your people are poor. You people were slaves” over and over again (Thiyagarajah 16:26). Her words mirror the extent of which the African asylum-seekers in Chris Cleave’s novel, Little Bee, are viewed upon by the British. Some of the verbal discrimination in the text included, “Don’t they teach you monkeys anything in the jungle? (Cleave 57)” and “Oh please. This is Europe. We’re a little more house-trained over here (186)”. The only exposure individuals like myself have of those in third world countries are the content shared by the media and through various forms of
Fly-Boys written by James Bradley, reveals the truth about nine young American World War II pilots that were shot down over the island of Chichi Jima. Out of the nine pilots one was rescued by a submarine. The other eight were captured by the Japanese, and disappeared. After the war the American government, along with the Japanese, covered up everything that had happened on Chichi Jima. Which had meant that the lives of the eight Fly-Boys were erased. Only the American and Japanese governments knew that the pilots survived the war. In this novel James Bradley reveals the story for the first time. Although, critics might disapprove on all this information making him seem bias, but in reality it is the truth that has just never been discovered.
The themes of hatred and judgment are shown all throughout Little Bee. Whether it’s Lawrence’s threats, the carelessness of the detention officers, or the sideways glances from the relatives at Andrew’s funeral, Little Bee is always in the middle of some kind of judgment. However, there is one character that shows pure love and understanding for Little Bee, no matter her exterior or culture. Charlie O’Rourke may be considered naïve, but it’s his naivety that allows him to see past the discrimination Little Bee receives. He is the prime example of how children are often blind to this type of abhorrence. Charlie gives the readers insight into this phenomenon by allowing Little Bee to comfort him and by finally removing his Batman costume.
Para 2: First of all, Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel by Kidd because it represented the community of women. The Boatwright sisters, along with Our Daughters of Mary, stood up for Lily when T. Ray came to take her home. Quoted from page 721, “The four of them lined up beside us, clutching their pocketbooks up against their bodies like they might have to beat the living heck out of somebody.” The Daughters of Mary all stood in the parlor of the Boatwright house, ready to take on whatever came their way. The community of women in this novel stuck together
In Diamant’s powerful novel The Red Tent the ever-silent Dinah from the 34th chapter of Gensis is finally given her own voice, and the story she tells is a much different one than expected. With the guiding hands of her four “mothers”, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, all the wives of Jacob, we grow with Dinah from her childhood in Mesoptamia through puberty, where she is then entered into the “red tent”, and well off into her adulthood from Cannan to Egypt. Throughout her journey we learn how the red tent is constantly looked upon for encouragement, solace, and comfort. It is where women go once a month during menstration, where they have their babies, were they dwell in illness and most importantly, where they tell their stories, passing on wisdom and spinning collective memories. “Their stories were like the offerings of hope and strength poured out before the Queen of Heavens, only these gifts were not for any god or goddess—but for me” (3). It essentially becomes a symbol of womanly strength, love and learning and serves as the basis for relationships between mothers, sisters, and daughters.
A beehive without a queen is a community headed for extinction. Bees cannot function without a queen. They become disoriented and depressed, and they stop making honey. This can lead to the destruction of the hive and death of the bees unless a new queen is brought in to guide them. Then, the bees will cooperate and once again be a prosperous community. Lily Melissa Owens, the protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, faces a similar predicament. While she does not live in a physical hive, the world acts as a hive. She must learn to work with its inhabitants, sharing a common direction, in order to reach her full potential. The motif of the beehive is symbolic of how crucial it is to be a part of a community in order to achieve
Grief leaves an imprint on those who experience it. Some can survive its deep sorrow, others cannot. In The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, she explores the effect of grief on the main characters. The novel opens with fourteen-year-old Lily Owns struggling with the knowledge that her mother was dead because she, as an infant, picked up a loaded gun and accidentally shot her. She runs away from her abusive father in search for answers of who her mother was. Lily hitchhikes to Tiburon, South Carolina; the location written on the back of an image of the Black Madonna – one of the only belongings she has of her mother’s. There, she finds a pink house inhabited by the Boatwright sisters who are African American women making Black Madonna honey. The Boatwright sisters have had their share of grief with the death of two of their sisters and the racial intolerance they face despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Boatwright sisters and Lily Owens have different methods of coping with grief; internalizing, ignoring, and forgetting are some of the ways they cope, with varying degrees of success. They discover that they must live past their grief, or else it will tear them apart.
Ruth, Elizabeth. “The Secret Life of Bees Traces the Growth of Lily’s Social Consciousness.” Coming of Age in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Greenhaven, 2013. 63-65. Print. Social Issues in Literature. Rpt. of “Secret Life of Bees.” The Globe and Mail 2 Mar. 2002: n. pag.
Innocence is something always expected to be lost sooner or later in life, an inevitable event that comes of growing up and realizing the world for what it truly is. Alice Walker’s “The Flowers” portrays an event in which a ten year old girl’s loss of innocence after unveiling a relatively shocking towards the end of the story. Set in post-Civil War America, the literary piece holds very particular fragments of imagery and symbolism that describe the ultimate maturing of Myop, the young female protagonist of the story. In “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, the literary elements of imagery, symbolism, and setting “The Flowers” help to set up a reasonably surprising unveiling of the gruesome ending, as well as to convey the theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing the harsh reality of this world.
reading the “Wild Bees” by James K. Baxter. The poem addresses a group of boys attacking a